E-Mail This Article to a Friend Spano spirit A perennial BSO guest makes his annual visit BY DAVID WEININGER

Those lamenting the Yankees’ recent acquisition of Alex Rodriguez might be heartened by the following. Last year, conductor Robert Spano conducted the New York Philharmonic for the first time. Despite having been the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s music director for seven years, he’d never been invited to conduct the big band across the East River. By that time, though, Spano had been a warmly welcomed guest here and at Tanglewood for more than 10 years.

Well, it might not make up for the latest Steinbrenner coup, but Bostonians can at least take comfort in the fact that Spano is one talent that we recognized early and have hung onto. Since being named Seiji Ozawa’s assistant conductor in 1990, Spano’s star has soared. He’s now in his final season in Brooklyn and his third as music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. His post brings with it a recording contract for Telarc — notable at a time when few American orchestras record regularly — and last year, his ASO recording of Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony copped two Grammy awards including Best Classical Album.

At the root of Spano’s success are not only a formidable musical technique but a voracious passion that infuses everything he does. In his recordings and his best performances, there’s a hair-trigger intensity that seems to make whatever he conducts leap boldly forward. His energy brings him closer to Bernstein than any other American conductor, though in the form of a tightly wound spring instead of Bernstein’s open ecstasy.

Perhaps the best place to sample his music making is on his most recent Telarc release with the ASO. Rainbow Body places two pieces by younger American composers — the title work, by Christopher Theofanidis, and Jennifer Higdon’s Blue Cathedral — alongside two American classics: Barber’s First Symphony and the suite from Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Despite the differences in the composers’ musical languages, all four works share a directness and sincerity that it seems absolutely fitting to call "American." In his liner note, Spano defines this attitude as "a spirit of openness, an attitude toward exploration, and an eye toward the future." Whatever the merits of his musicology, the performances are fantastic — especially the ASO’s crackling brass and rich string tone — and the conductor’s drive makes the familiar Barber and Copland scores sound fresh, even radical.

Another of Spano’s hallmarks is his imaginative approach to programming, and next week’s BSO program is no exception. He’ll start with Last Round, a work for string orchestra by his friend Osvaldo Golijov. Originally a chamber work for nine strings, it’s a two-movement memorial to the great tango composer Astor Piazzolla. Following that is the Third Symphony of Oliver Knussen, an intense and highly integrated work about 15 minutes long. Knussen conceived the piece as a fantasia on Ophelia’s madness and death in Hamlet. True to form, it’s a rather schizoid work that features highly sectionalized orchestral writing and a lot of knotty contrapuntal lines that trip all over one other at close intervals; it culminates in a huge, sustained tutti chord that slowly ebbs into silence.

After intermission, Spano and soloist Garrick Ohlsson tackle Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, that ne plus ultra of virtuoso warhorses. And as if all that weren’t enough, Spano will put on his pianist hat over the weekend and join the Boston Symphony Chamber Players (and Ohlsson) for a Sunday concert featuring music by Mozart and Schumann. Maybe A-Rod will do okay at third, but can he do all that?

Robert Spano conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra on March 4, 5, 6, and 9 at 8 p.m. at Symphony Hall, 301 Massachusetts Avenue in Boston; tickets are $26 to $95. He plays with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players on March 7 at 3 p.m. at Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street in Boston; tickets for that one are $17 to $30. Call (617) 266-1200 for both events.